Shavuot, a Celebration of the Mind

By ERICA BROWN

WALKING THE BIBLE
A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
By Bruce Feiler.
480 pages. Perennial. $14.95.

One of the monikers that we, the Jewish People, have been given is people of the book. Our perennial love affair with the written word has its roots in the Biblical holiday of Shavuot. Coming exactly 50 days after Passover, it is a holiday of anticipation and preparation.

As Carly Simon sang in her song, "Anticipation" (which gained fame when she sold it to Heinz Ketchup who made it into a commercial jingle!): "We can never know about the days to come, but we think about them anyway." The time between Passover and Shavuot is one of anticipation–not for ketchup–but for the Torah, for Divine Law. Shavuot celebrates the giving of Torah, and the Jewish people's relationship to this sacred text. For thousands of years we have studied its words, wrestled with its messages, and carried its scrolls wherever we as a people have wandered. The Torah rested as the cornerstone of our Jewish civilization throughout the ages and as the bedrock of our Jewish identity.

Shavuot is a time to show our deep appreciation for how our texts have shaped our lives and Western society generally. The five books of the Hebrew Bible contain the basic code for life in a civil society and its complex family narratives help us explore our own relationships. I like to think of Shavuot as the holiday for people of the book to celebrate our relationship with words.

Using Shavuot as a time to re-acquaint ourselves with Jewish texts brings me to Bruce Feiler, the author of Walking the Bible. He, too, wanted to get to know the Hebrew Bible with greater intimacy. So he decided to walk it.

Feiler trekked with his Bible from Noah's Mount Ararat in Turkey to Mount Nebo where Moses parted company with the children of Israel. Feiler shares his physical and metaphysical journey with us in his book. In the introductory pages, Feiler lets one quote stand alone: "Now the Lord said to Abram, 'Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you.'" It's an apt quote for the journey that the author has himself undertaken–a quest to get to know himself better through the study of an ancient text in its ancient context. Feiler was struck by "how the stories and the places seemed so intimately connected as if each carried the memory of the other deep within."

Feiler's journey reminds us of another Shavuot connection. In the synagogue on Shavuot, we take out our own Hebrew Bibles and open them up to the book of Ruth. She, like Abraham (and perhaps like Feiler), took an enormous walk into the unknown. Accompanying her mother-in-law Naomi, Ruth walked from Moab to Bethlehem and walked straight into Judaism. This is the story of her conversion and her eventual acceptance by the community. Her walk becomes a metaphor for spiritual transformation. Like the abstraction of study, Ruth's journey was a connection of mind and soul. On Shavuot, we reflect on how many powerful soul-changing journeys begin in the mind.

Feiler ends his travel log of religion, geography and history with a beautiful observation: "The land is not the only destination; the destination is the place where human beings live in consort with the divine." In arriving at this thought, Feiler–like Abraham and Ruth–understands that getting to a place is only the beginning and not the end of the journey. The walk may be the metaphor for the journey but is not the end of it. In all of these instances, the real journey is the mental transition of identity that comes with having a new land or a new name or a new community.

When we read the book of Ruth we understand how much courage is required to go against convention and our own past and how much is to be gained when we arrive at our destination. On Shavuot, we recognize the Torah's powerful role in shaping our identities as Jews. And even further, we acknowledge that the Torah as our sacred text and the bedrock of our identity, is the vehicle through which we can connect with the Divine.


Reprinted with permission from the AVI CHAI Bookshelf, where birthright israel alumni can order free books and periodicals.